After breakfasting at Elspeth Heddle’s public in Staxigo on milk, and ham and eggs, a partan, and haddocks, they went on to the ruins of Girnigo. The occasional fetching of the wind’s breath, which the Dominie had noticed in their morning walk, was now become a steady gale, and the waves began to break against the rugged cliffs and headlands to the southward, insomuch, that, when the party reached the peninsula on which the princely ruins of the united castles of Girnigo and Sinclair are situated, they found several fishermen, belonging to Wick, who had gone out to sea at daybreak, busily drawing their boats on shore, in the little port on the south side of the cliffs, under the walls. The visitors inquired why they were so careful in such bright and summer weather; but they directed the attention of the Dominie to long flakes of goat’s beard in the skies, and to the sea-birds flying towards the upland. By this time the billows were breaking white and high on the extremities of Noss-head, and the long grass on the bartisans and window-sills of the ruins streamed and hissed in the wind. The sun was bright; but the streaks of hoary vapour that veined the pure azure of the heavens retained their position and menacing appearance. There was, however, nothing in the phenomena of the skies to occasion any apprehension; and the party, without thinking of the immediate horrors of a storm, sympathised with their guide, as he related to them the mournful legends of those solitary towers. But, although he dwelt, with particular emphasis, on the story of the Bishop, whom one of the Earls of Caithness had ordered his vassals to boil in a cauldron, on account of his extortions, their sympathy was more sorrowfully awakened by the woeful fate of the young Master of Caithness, who, in 1572, fell a victim to the jealousy of his father. ‘George, the Earl at that time,’ said the schoolmaster, ‘with his son the Master of Caithness, was on the leet of the lovers of Euphemia, the only daughter of an ancestor of Lord Reay. The lady was young and beautiful, and naturally preferred the son to the father; but the Earl was a haughty baron, and, in revenge for his son proving a more thriving wooer, was desirous of putting him for a season out of the way--but not by the dirk, as the use and wont of that epoch of unrule might have justified. Accordingly, one afternoon, as they were sitting together in the hall at yonder architraved window in the second story, the wrathful Earl clapped his hands thrice, and in came three black-aviced kerns in rusted armour, who, by a signal harmonized between them and Earl George, seized the lawful heir, and dragged him to a dampish captivity in yon vault, of which you may see the yawning hungry throat in the chasm between the two principal lumps of the buildings.’